PineTab

Keneda

@Yuri
That's not quite this kind of keyboard problem here...

AppLee

@andybleaden I can't get my sd card to plug in at all.

You have to give more context here.
Are you having the same issue as andybleaden ?
What do you try to achieve ?

andybleaden

@AppLee just to note I have had no sd card issues. Mine were like all others = Bluetooth rotation sound (fixable)

I have read sdcard is hard for some to insert (small space) (upside down !) And boy does it ping the card out fast and far!

I use it to test other distros (too) often but still using and enjoying by Ubuntu Pinetab

Main beef for me still Bluetooth and rotation. Fix those and it's fine for me

tomoqv

I just got my PineTab with keyboard stand and trying it out.

Currently running on UBports devel channel to see the progress to the software. As has been commented on above, it is still rather buggy. Sometimes trackpad will work, sometimes not and sometimes the mouse cursor disappears completely. At times, there seem to be an invisible limit for the mouse cursor movement, which I can't move beyond.

Screen resolution appears to be less than optimal. E.g. indicators are not crisp and window titles text is kind of rugged. Also, scaling in the browser makes address and bottom bars look huge, consuming a great deal of screen real estate. Is this a settings issue, or is it just a screen resolution that works poorly with Unity8?

I haven't tried to many things yet, but among those that work for me are:
Dekko2
Teleports
UT Tweak Tool
Browser (with scaling problems)
Keyboard (trackpad sometimes)
OpenStore
Terminal

Not working:
Rotation
Bluetooth
User accounts
GPS

The device is rather sluggish at this stage, but I am confident that will get better with future upgrades. That probably also goes for battery, which has dropped from 100% down to about 60% in a couple of hours light use.

Interesting to try it out and hopefully it will be able to replace my aging BQ tablet with UBports eventually. I really like the nifty stand with built-in keyboard.

arubislander

@tomoqv said in PineTab:

That probably also goes for battery, which has dropped from 100% down to about 60% in a couple of hours light use.

Try detaching the tablet from the keyboard so that the backlight on the keyboard turns off, you are free to reattach the tablet then if you want. You will be surprised as to how long the battery will last in that case. I think being attached to the keyboard stops the tablet from going into deep sleep once it has been turned on.

matteo

@arubislander you can even turn off the keyboard backlight while you are using it: in fact there is a buttons combination to be executed, i.e. pressing at the same time the Pine button on the left hand side of the bottom bar + the button with a light bulb depicted on the right hand side of the bottom bar

arubislander

@matteo Ah, TIL. Thans!

tomoqv

Since yesterday, my PineTab won't see or connect to any wifi networks. I have restarted the device multiple times, but still the same. I have also toggled wifi and tried to turn on airplane mode (which doesn't seem to work at all), but to no avail.

Edit: I managed to fix this with the nmcli command.

nmcli networking on
nmcli radio wifi on

Yuri

@halucigenia I have the same issues with headphones, bluetooth and the microphone on my Pinetab. Morph takes some getting used to and benefits from uAdblock. Morph has hidden reload and close buttons in the adress bar.

Yugami

@matteo that would be nice, but apparently only works on some people's?

Posted from not my pinetab

Yuri

@Yuri I have five ports on my Pinetab; headphone, power, usb, usb 2 Ahost and micro usb OTG. I can't see an sd slot.

Yuri

@Keneda Installing Fench as an addional language changes my screen keyborard when I press the globe.

Keneda

@Yuri
It's not about OSK, but the physical one, with backlight, that makes pinetab a laptop.
Not already availiable as accessory but you can see it here :
https://pine64.com/product/pinetab-10-1-linux-tablet-with-detached-backlit-keyboard/?v=0446c16e2e66

andybleaden

Has anyone had any joy with the Bluetooth/Rotation issues

I see they are getting fixed on the other build such as Mobian/Manjaro and Sailfish so would be good to know if those fixes (I know it aint that easy!) are portable from them to us?

tomoqv

Is the Pinetab software being worked on or on halt atm? I have a Pinetab Ubports edition, but almost immediately switched to Mobian as Ubports at the time of delivery wasn't very functional. I haven't seen much activity on this forum or elsewhere regarding UBports/Pine64 lately, particularly when it comes to the Pinetab.

poVoq

This has been just discussed in the latest Q&A. Sadly the PinePhone / PineTab seem to have not been the main focus of the core developers in the last few weeks (with personal issues adding on top of that).
And as the PinePhones/Tabs are architecturally quite different from the main bulk of Halium based devices, many changes that are currently made don't benefit those devices.

One of the comments on the Q&A where quite interesting though: despite the high number of PinePhones/Tabs sold and the prominent featuring of UT on them, this has apparently resulted in very few additional contributions to UT development. This very strange given the current developer focused nature of these devices, and I fear very many of the initially excited people switched to other software stacks like Mobian shortly after receiving their devices.

While based on comments by the core UT developers this is just seen as an unfortunate fact, without offering further insight, I personally believe this is very much due to the structure of UT itself. As it stands it is just not a very developer friendly environment, with too many hoops to jump through* and architectural differences to more standard Linux distributions.
Thus currently UT seems to be a bit on life support, driven mainly by some very dedicated core contributors (but they show symptoms of developer burnout) and some external developers that are there because they are (for now) stuck with older Android devices.

Ultimately this sadly does not bode well for the future of UT, and the current technical debt (old qt and 16.04 base) are further weighting down on it.

I know that some of the core developers are tired of this discussion and wish that it would just "go away", but I truly hope that something good can come out of it, with UT steering away from trying to do too many things differently and those alienating potential contributors.

*noticeable exception being Clickable, which is a really nice way to build release packages, although Click as a package system itself is another case in point.

A Former User

@poVoq I think that all boils down to the fact that mobile OS are lacking developers (compared with desktop Linux) because Android and iOS were more or less closed. Now we have the hardware, but not many are able to play with them. Sadly, this is not something that can be done over night, plus, bringing the device to the latest kernel is not for the faint of heart and not many are able to do it.

sledgehampster

@andybleaden This worked for me as well. Guess I will have to manually switch back and forth from headphones to Line out until a fix is put out. Thanks!